Judith Butler Comes To Brooklyn College

Since the enemies of Israel neither slumber nor sleep, it should come as no surprise that at the center of the current storm over the acquiescence of Brooklyn College in an academically sponsored campus event designed to expel Israel from the family of nations stands Professor Judith Butler of the University of California.

Butler is to be one of the featured speakers at the February 7 rally, sponsored by Brooklyn’s Department of Political Science and other “activist” groups, on behalf of the BDS (Boycott, Divest, Sanction) campaign, an offshoot of the longstanding Arab boycott of Israel (which was declared illegal by Congress in 1977).

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Although she had gained considerable attention in academia for promoting the notion that masculinity and femininity are merely social “constructions” and for winning, in 1998, first prize in the annual Bad Writing contest of the journal Philosophy and Literature, it was not until a decade ago that Butler achieved national prominence as an anti-Israel agitator.

In September 2002 Harvard president Lawrence Summers had charged that “at Harvard and …universities across the country” faculty-initiated petitions were calling “for the university to single out Israel among all nations as the lone country where it is inappropriate for any part of the university’s endowment to be invested.”

In August 2003 Butler, already a signatory of nearly every major anti-Israel petition, including the “divestment” one, circulating on American campuses, published a rebuttal of Summers called “No, It’s Not Antisemitic” in the London Review of Books. Summers had chivalrously gone out of his way to say that “Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent”; to annihilate this distinction was a primary aim of Butler’s counter-attack. Using the tu quoque (you too) strategy, she called Summers’s accusations “a blow against academic freedom, in effect, if not intent.” His words have had “a chilling effect on political discourse.”

Apparently the chill had not taken hold at Harvard itself, which that November would confer honors on Oxford’s Tom Paulin, famous for urging that Jews in Judea/Samaria “should be shot dead.”

Butler perfunctorily assented to Summers’s recommendation that anti-Semitism be condemned, but she seemed incapable either of recognizing it in such (to her) mild “public criticisms” as economic warfare against Israel or calls for its dismantling or assaults on Zionism itself or interfering with suicide bombers. Indeed, she saw no difference between Jews intentionally murdered by terrorists and Arabs accidentally killed by Israeli efforts to repel the murderers.

Butler asserted that nobody examining the divestment petitions could take them as condoning anti-Semitism. “We are asked to conjure a listener who attributes an intention to the speaker: so-and-so has made a public statement against the Israeli occupation, and this must mean that so-and-so hates Jews.”

But Summers was perfectly correct in stating that one need not “hate Jews” in order to perform actions or utter words that are “anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.”

Take a well-known case: when Dickens wrote Oliver Twist he harbored no hatred of Jews or intention to harm them. He said of Fagin: “He’s such an out and outer I don’t know what to make of him.” The reason for Dickens’s puzzlement was that he did not indeed “make” Fagin, and therefore didn’t know what to make of him. Fagin was ready-made for Dickens by the folklore of Christendom, which had fixed the Jew in the role of Christ-killer, agent of Satan, inheritor of Judas, thief, fence, corrupter of the young; to which list of attributes Butler and her comrades now add “Zionist imperialist and occupier.”

Has Oliver Twist often been “anti-Semitic in effect”? Of course – or does Butler think it is for their concern over the homeless in Victorian England that Arab publishers keep cheap translations of the novel in print?

Butler’s ultimate use of the tu quoque strategy was to make Summers himself guilty of what he attacked. Why? Because he assumed that Jews can only be victims. Apparently the hundreds murdered and the thousands mutilated by Arab terrorists between September 27, 2000 and the time Butler published her essay were not sufficient to meet her stringent requirements for (Jewish) victim status.

But if Israelis were not the victims of Palestinian aggression, why did Jewish schools in Jerusalem require protection by armed guards while Arab schools in Nazareth did not? Why was getting on a bus in Jerusalem or going to a cafe in Haifa a form of Russian roulette, far more dangerous than prancing about as a “human shield” for Yasir Arafat?

Edward Alexander is professor emeritus of English at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the author of a number of books including the just-released “Jews Against Themselves”; “The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies”; “The Jewish Wars”; “The State of the Jews”; and “The Holocaust and the War of Ideas.”

4 COMMENTS

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The move from a structuralist account in which capital is.
understood to structure social relations in relatively.
homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations.
are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation.
brought the question of temporality into the thinking of.
structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian.
theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical.
objects to one in which the insights into the contingent.
possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of.
hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies.
of the rearticulation of power.

Prof. Rosenthal neglects to mention that it was for this piece of stupefying opacity that Judith Butler won her first prize in the Bad Writing Contest conducted annually by the Literature/Philosophy journal.